Companies often face unique problems when trying to sell products over the Internet. Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, e-commerce companies do not have a physical store or location where a salesperson can help both novice and knowledgeable customers find sought after products. In the web environment, it is the customer's responsibility to identify a product that meets his or her needs. Even customers with considerable experience navigating e-commerce websites sometimes find it difficult to locate a desired product from among hundreds or thousands of offered products. For novice customers, the task of shopping online via the web can be unproductive and even frustrating.
Companies with e-commerce websites continue to look for ways to make their websites more dynamic, compelling, and easier for users to navigate and locate products. Today, e-commerce websites commonly serve pages with rich images of products and corresponding product descriptions. Unfortunately, there is little consistency among the many ways that products can be described. Product descriptions are often left to the manufacturer or distributor of the products, and hence, the terms and attributes used to describe those products are typically not uniform. For instance, different manufacturers or retailers of digital cameras may characterize zoom attributes or image capture modes in any number of different ways. This non-uniformity can make it difficult for users to locate products, compare similar products, or understand the differentiating features when considering a purchase decision.
Moreover, finding a particular product or set of similar products on a website can be challenging, especially for websites offering a very large number of products. Many websites offer search mechanisms (e.g., such as keyword search engines) that allow users to input descriptive terms for items of interest. Regrettably, due in part to the inconsistency of how the products are initially defined, it is not uncommon for search mechanisms to return one of two extremes: (1) zero product hits or (2) hundreds of product hits with varying degrees of relevance. In the case of many product hits, it is up to the customer to sort through the results, which can be unproductive and annoying.
One way of making product search simpler and more robust is through further advancing textual search technology. However, this approach inherently burdens the searching customer with the task of identifying comparable products among the search results, and with the task of then extracting and normalizing the values of the most important product attributes. Another approach to improve searchability is to improve consistency in the product descriptions by asking manufactures and merchants to describe their products with a certain level of particularity. For example, an e-commerce company may ask a manufacturer or merchant to describe its products using attributes and values that can be added to a searchable index connected to a product search mechanism. However, this manual process is time-intensive and costly to implement.
Accordingly, there remains a need for improving navigation of e-commerce websites and the ability for users to locate and compare desired products.